Luan O’Carroll of Xoetrope has been very active lately working on bug fixes and enhancements to the Xoetrope Color Wheel. It’s a Swing component that allows choosing colors in a very nice and visually appealing way, and it can be used in JColorChooser or as a part of larger UI (see video links below).

The latest additions available in the XUI itself as well as in the development version of Substance 4.1 add mouse-wheel support for the color wheel and the brightness / saturation sliders. This screencast shows the new features in action, and this screencast shows how the color wheel can be used in a larger UI.

In short, you can use the mouse wheel on the color wheel itself to play with the hue, and on the sliders to play with the brightness and saturation of the selected color. In addition, holding the Control key while wheeling over the sliders will apply the brightness / saturation on the color wheel itself. Here is how the color wheel looks like in default mode:

Here is how it looks like with decreased brightness:

And here is how it looks like with decreased saturation:

If you want to reuse this component in your code (like the Colorspace of Teppefall), make sure that you read and follow the terms of XUI license (identical to Mozilla Public License) in XUI.license of Substance distribution.